ry lines dictated by his hate, or
bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then
Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said,
used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she
persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her.
As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not
writ large in the four books of the _Dunciad_? Mr. Swinburne is indeed
able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy
war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong,
'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all
blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.'

I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's
bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels,
the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a
moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened
liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy,
'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and
contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be
quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with
a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The _Dunciad_ was quite uncalled-
for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor:

'The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl.'

But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Pope did not begin
brawling first. Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine, and who begged
Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the
Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to
him: 'Take care the bad poets do not out-wit you as they have done the
good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names
to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as
well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the
difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice
was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be
Popes, but for the real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten. As it
is, only their names survive in the index to the _Dunciad_; their
indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if
the hist